Greenhouse gases, which trap heat and warm the planet, originate from a range of human activities. Our group performed an analysis of GHG emissions in a particular area of the Bay Area. The scope of the analysis is to estimate GHG emissions in a city (Redwood City), represented by three ZIP codes(94061,94063,94065).
Transportation is a great contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, so we analyzed commuter vehicle emissions in Redwood City. We took our data from the home block group and work block group route pairs in the (LODES) data, and calculate the distance and time for each trip using MapBox function. Finally, total GHG emissions are calculated from the travel mode in ACS combined with emfac emission factor.
When acquiring a redwood city work-family block pair, to avoid the problem of routing duplication between zip codes within the city, our outbound is defined as beyond the city boundaries (the combined area of three zip codes). Trips to Redwood City may come from all over the country and we will be focusing on work car commute emissions so we will only get California blocks. Due to the small granularity of the block area, the carbon footprint brought by the traffic within the same block can be ignored. To simplify the model, we leave them out.
It can be seen that of the 23,196 block areas in CA, about 80% of the areas are connected to Redwood city in terms of work travel.
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